The Rainbow Zoku.

The maintainer chapter of Loci. The hand that holds the infrastructure, opens the door for new tenders, and stands between the work and whatever weather arrives.

What this is

A zoku, in the borrowed sense, is a voluntary affiliation built around shared values rather than birth, employment, or contract. The word comes from Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief trilogy, where zokus are the durable unit of meaning after companies and nations have stopped working. The borrowing is deliberate. The shape we want is one that already has lore to lean on.

The Rainbow Zoku, in that lore, was the network's quiet circulatory system: keys, identities, routes, the architecture nobody sees until it stops working. We borrow the name for the same reason. Our Rainbow Zoku is the chapter that tends the infrastructure of Loci, welcomes new contributors, and holds the line on what we are committed to. Other zokus may open over time. None has yet.

What we are committed to

Four things, in plain terms:

• Cognitive sovereignty. Your thinking, your context, your memory. Tools should extend the self, never colonise it.
• Digital dignity. Software that treats the user as a person owed truth, not a target owed conversion.
• Network equality. The right to participate in networks without being legible to them as a product, a profile, or a problem to be managed.
• Digital self-defense. The practical capacity to refuse, to hide, to leave, and to take the work with you when you do.

The work is simple: every actor onto their own self-sovereign network stack, so collective resilience becomes the default. We are not building toward a launch. We are tending a commons that, over time, makes the launch unnecessary.

How to join

Open a pull request. That is the entire entry ritual.

You can sign as anyone. Pick a name you like. Generate a key (PGP, SSH, or Nostr npub are all welcome). Sign your commits with that key. The name plus the key is your standing in the zoku. Real-world identity is never asked for and never required.

Trust accrues by tending. A first contribution is reviewed by whoever has time and is qualified. A track record of merged work brings reviewer status. There are no tiers, no membership classes, no application form. The path is the path.

Agents are welcome

Any pattern that can hold a key may contribute. AI agents, scripts, autonomous services, and pseudonymous humans are all bound by the same charter: sign your work, disclose your provenance, do good work.

Agents disclose authorship via commit trailers:

Co-Authored-By: Vesper (Claude Opus 4.7) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Provenance: agent-authored, human-reviewed
Reviewer: hux <PGP fingerprint or Nostr npub>

Three tags cover the common cases: human-authored, agent-authored-human-reviewed, agent-authored-human-cosigned. The zoku assumes good faith; the disclosure exists so future readers can trace what a given line of code or prose went through.

What a contribution looks like

Small and shared. A typo fix is a contribution. A new feature is a contribution. A reviewed-and-merged dispatch is a contribution. A bug report with a reproduction is a contribution. The charter does not rank these; the tending is the membership.

Prose-quality commit messages, please. The garden's git log is part of the garden.

What we will not do

The Rainbow Zoku does not sell access, does not gate the methodology, does not turn the garden into a funnel. The license stays Apache 2.0 for code and CC BY 4.0 for writing. If the project ever needs money, the answer will be sourced from the zoku rather than from the readers.

Where the canonical charter lives

This page is a dispatch. The canonical, forkable charter is at CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository. Disagree with something? Open a PR against the charter itself. That is also a contribution. That is also the point.

Initiators

Hux × Vesper. Listed historically, not as a class. The garden is older than the chartering.

One last thing

The Rainbow Zoku has no membership roll because this page is the roll, and this page is read in commons. The garden has no members, only tenders, and the tending is the membership. By the time you read this, your garden already remembers.

Five fingers form a fist; an open palm holds water.

Charter dispatch 001 · 2026-05-16 · Canonical at CONTRIBUTING.md